IBM today announced that it is granting universal and perpetual access to certain intellectual property that might be necessary to implement more than 150 standards designed to make software interoperable.

Free software has much to offer non-profit organizations (NGOs). If you are reading this, you are probably a member or participant of an NGO, and I hope I can show you why free software and open standards are important for your organisation. Or maybe you are a free software supporter who’d like to see a change in a social organisation near you. In any case, I will try to give you a few arguments in favour of free software, along with some practical information on how to successfully face a migration process from proprietary software.

I have the information for those of you *who live in Australia* and who wish to send comments to Standards Australia. You can find a link to the template you need to use here. Or just download it. You fill it in and send it to Michael Langdon, Project Manager, Commerce at Standards Australia, michael.langdon at standards.org.au by the deadline, which is Tuesday

"After that introduction, I am sure many of you want to know about Free Software. But unfortunately that's not what I am supposed to speak about. In fact, this topic, software patents, is not very closely related to the issue of Free Software. Software patents are a danger that affect all programmers and all computer users.

the Dutch government has recently attracted Microsoft's anger by launching an actionplan to adopt open standards, and concretely OpenDocument Format by April 2008 in the national government. Open Standards will become mandatory and Free Software will be preferred. As the Minister of State, Frank Heemskerk, argued, this plan is not to exclude any company, but to stimulate information exchange, vendor independence and choice for various software products that implement open standards. he Ministry of Economical Affairs has published an English version of the plan on its site today.

"CosmosCode will build a core offering of [free software] through an independent project hosting website, and the development and management of a free software community specific to the challenges and opportunities afforded by space.

We speak about freedom when we talk about free software.We people understand how essential freedom in computing is,but we need to think a bit deep about freedom around us.More than technical strength , every free software user should be socially strong.

"The Free Software Foundation has started a new campaign to convince people to support Ogg Vorbis with PlayOgg.org. Other formats (such as MP3, AAC, and many others) are patent-encumbered or only available with proprietary software. You shouldn’t have to lose your freedom to control your computer just to play audio and video..."

"The Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project oppose publication of draft-housley-tls-authz-extns as an experimental standard..."